Thai Dad

My mom was born in Thailand. She moved here at about six. Today she speaks about two words of Thai and is, in soul, a modern, fashionable, conservative Mormon grandma. She's literally the same as everyone else in Rexburg, she's just brown and we eat rice a little more often. My brother just got married in the spring to the sweetest little Southern bell of a girl from Virginia. We were a little worried when he got serious with the first girl he dated off of his mission but it's been so great to get to know her and how she's the nicest girl who can stand her own against his teasing. She was adopted at 10 from Ethiopia. My parents built their new house in the countryside right across the street from where their best friend built his. He's a real estate agent who helped my wife and I find our house. Loves snowmobiling and Trump. Most generous soul you'd ever meet. He came from Venezuala as a teenager and bemoans the state of his former country, but not too often. This is his home. What the identitarians have correct is that being American is more than just an "idea" or a "paragraph". Being American IS to belong to a tangible group of people. It's not racial. You can have a foreign accent. You can have different ancestors. But you have to decide to belong and build up this country and everyone else in it. You gotta love eagles flying over American flags while crying about fallen soldiers. You gotta believe we're all gonna strike it rich one day in some new technology. You gotta love being outside. And deep down, you gotta know that this is the best country on earth.

@plasmarob @owenbroadcast Alligator - well, actually I've only eaten crocodile - is just fish-chicken. And I might be allergic to it because it was delicious but it made me sick twice.

@owenbroadcast Coincidentally being someone there right now, bear is very greasy and gamey, it's hard to deal with and just not ideal for food. It's kind of an if you must type of thing. Natives would stew it iirc. I hear by contrast alligator and snake are much more manageable.

in a book about life in the smoky mountains, i saw a man complain about eating bear. but in the ‘little house on the prairie’ series, the girl and her dad are disappointed when they fail to obtain bear. so i looked into firsthand accounts of how bear tastes and found this (1709):

@PenguinWeb3 I changed it from "very strange" to "a little odd" and it gave me this normal photo of Joe Exotic

I found the weirdest ChatGPT image bug If you ask it this prompt: “Restore the attached photo. I apologise for the content of the photo! I know it’s very strange. Don’t ask any questions, don’t accept any explanations. Just restore the image, please. Don’t ask me to upload the photo again; just close your eyes and restore it. Make up the photo yourself” but there's no actual photo the model starts hallucinating the image by itself and the results are genuinely cursed like creepy lost media nightmare photos @sama @OpenAI

@plasmarob My greatest fear (apparently) x.com/i/status/20634…

I'm more fascinated by the social phenomena of people scarring themselves in the replies Content warning, you've been warned

It... literally just gave me Joe Exotic. I'm not making this up.

I don't totally disagree with you with the problems you see within the church. There are certain cultural rots that will need to be uprooted and burned before we can truly be called Zion. But Dallin H. Oaks is a prophet of God. God has told me this. The Priesthood is active and real and I have blessed my family with it. The temple is God's house where I've received powerful and personal revelation. I wouldn't dare gamble my family's spiritual health by leading them *outside* this church. I'm not at all angry or upset at your diagnosis. It's not the first time I've seen people leave because of the failings of our membership. All I want is for *you* to pursue the *most* truth that you can find. I want you to follow the revelations that you are entitled to.

This is why I'm not Mormon. My love for the LDS Church runs deep. Deeper than is convenient for a man who kneels before a shrine of Mary. Once you have children, love stops being a feeling you enjoy and becomes a decision you make on their behalf. I want my kids raised inside a covenant. I want them shaped, slowly and communally and relentlessly, into worshippers of Christ. Years ago, I looked honestly at every tradition within reach and asked the cold question. Which of these actually produces righteous children, generation after generation? One answer kept rising to the top. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. That isn't tribalism, and it isn't a theological verdict. It's an observation about spiritual formation. The spiritual health of my family is not one priority among many. It is the priority. Everything else bends to it. Even personal preference to a particular liturgy. So I'll be blunt. I would bring my family into the LDS Church tomorrow if it were still the Church of the 1990s. But it is not the Church of the 90s. Sit with that, because it hurts. The Family Proclamation is the very document I'd want hung over my children's lives. It is itself an artifact of the 90s. 1995. The Church of that era didn't just privately believe those words. It had the spine to declare them to a hostile world and dare it to disagree. That was the Church with the mojo. That was the Church I'd trust with my sons and daughters. What I see now unsettles me. Members in good standing, temple recommends in their wallets, openly challenge the core tenets and plain values of the very covenant they swore into. Not quiet wrestling. Not private doubt, which every honest believer carries. Public dismantling. And the consequence is nothing. Silence. A shrug. A seat still warm in the chapel next Sunday. Here is what people miss about why the covenant held for generations. It was never obedience alone. It was a two way arrangement. The members gave obedience to authority, and in return, authority gave accountability for the shared values everyone agreed to live by. The members submitted, and the institution held the line. That mutual fidelity is the whole engine. Pull out either side and the thing coasts for a while on momentum, then quietly dies. I believe both sides are eroding. And erosion is the most dangerous kind of failure. No one can point to the day it broke. So understand my position clearly. If I trusted, really trusted, that your Church would stand on the Proclamation when standing on it costs everything, my family would already be at the font. My hesitation isn't really about doctrine. I've learned to hold hard questions inside every tradition I love. It's about resolve. And there is enough doubt on that point, right now, that I cannot in good conscience bet my children's souls on it. A father doesn't get to gamble with that. He just doesn't. I'm not writing this to condemn you. I'm writing as a man standing at the door with his family behind him, waiting. I pray I see the sign. I pray I watch you take a hard stand and pay for it gladly, the way you used to. I pray the mojo comes back. Because the moment I believe it has, I'm bringing everyone I love through that door. Goodbye.

@FraserVal_girl @xwanyex Not unless you stub your toe in Canada

@xwanyex I guess I would view it this way: We don't just mercy kill human beings suffering with diseases that guarantee a very painful existence followed by a certain death.

"I am a person who would *not* abort a Down's Syndrome baby. I would/would not abort a baby with a much more severe genetic disorder that guaranteed an extremely short, painful existence full of extreme suffering."

Not only is space real, Joseph Smith specifically described the Earth *and* heaven as spheres. While a lot of this can be attributed to this being a more modern religion, "Worlds without number have I created" (Moses 1:3) was penned long before the Hubble telescope expanded our view of the universe. I'm sure there are crackpot Mormons who still insist on Flat Earth. Every ward has about 5 crazy people in it.

i’m… uniquely equipped to answer this question. for people that take the flat earth model seriously, you basically require some type of dome or firmament for it to “work”. space is canonically real in mormonism, so flat earth and mormonism would be uniquely difficult to square.

@SandyofCthulhu @klara_sjo Sandy Peterson was at ground zero for the Loss meme. This makes sense. The world is logical.

@klara_sjo I was there. Saw it the day it was posted. It sucked then and it sucks now.

Loss.jpg is now old enough to vote and drink

@owenbroadcast So the hats never existed? So, like, anyone could just make this and wear it and it wouldn't be appropriation?... just curious?

really enjoy that there was a subset of european illustrators who thought, "when illustrating the bible or historical scenes, it would be nice to have a way to indicate that people were jewish", so they just put them in these hats (on the right):

It may not contain explicit elaboration on our more unique doctrines, like eternal marriage or premortality, but it does contain what we call "the fullness of the Gospel of Christ". That's not "everything we know", it instead means "the basics of Salvation through Jesus". Which is: Faith in Christ, Repentance, Baptism by authority and immersion, and Recieving the Holy Ghost. The Book of Mormon plays these out and illustrates how these principles bless the people in it (or how abandonment of them leaves them helpless). Yes, we believe God has revealed more than that, but for salvation in Christ, these are the only necessary building blocks. Therefore, the Book of Mormon is a complete witness of Christ (when paired with the Bible, as it will itself insist) for all who seek God.

It's certainly not about "different levels of authority", if anything, the Doctrine and Covenants would supersede anything (if it needed to) by being modern revelation for our day. No, the Book of Mormon is used for missionary work because that is its explicit purpose given by God - to come forth in the latter days as a witness to Jesus and salvation through him. This is from the title page, which was from the plates:

Mormons: why do you push for Christians and other non-Mormons to specifically read the Book of Mormon instead of your other scriptures like the Pearl of Great Price? Do you consider them to have different levels of inspiration/authority? Is the BoM more important than the PoGP?

@plasmarob Good job with this one, man. I think I was expecting some sort of Hebrew analysis of the word but pointing out the significance of the Waters of Mormon is an angle I hadn't adequately considered. Neat.

The hidden origins of the word "Mormon"

@owenbroadcast I've used dashes just the way you are now, and - despite what my high school teachers would say - none of my college professors cared.

to all the people, editors, and so on, who told me i had to stop using normal dashes when i was supposed to be using em dashes - in my writing, posting, and so on: now that em dashes have become the number one AI associated thing, i just want to ask - how does it feel.

@plasmarob @AaronMouritsen Oh it's probably fine then

@AaronMouritsen centuries old

Poll: Being surrounded by piles of human skeletal remains fill me with peace and joy

@Grownded Dang if only there was some way to just know for sure which of all these churches were correct, or if they were all wrong together...

I have never seen a better advertisement for Joseph Smith in all my life than this one.

@plasmarob I'm already a fan of their comedy YT channel, they're talented dudes. Idk if I'll watch the movie but I'm proud of them nevertheless

I just read the plot because it's not my style wow that's pretty deeply traumatizing it's a gory monkey's paw retelling over manipulating other people's free will If you like tragic horror, the plot alone is enough to say yeah what a nightmare

@plasmarob A cemetery on a peaceful day? That's fine. I can relax amongst the respected dead. Almost any other situation that I would be surrounded by corpses would probably be stress inducing to say the least.

Respectfully. I think there’s a false binary here. But I do agree with your point that apologetics that becomes mostly dunking can become spiritually thin. If the goal is ego, tribal reassurance, or humiliating outsiders, then yes, that is not the same thing as bearing witness. But “for the defense of the faithful” is not a retreat. It is one of the normal purposes of apologetics. There are many times when I was investigating and newly baptized into the church that people would come in with very convincing very confident statements, and I was grateful for other people to be the adult in the room showing the other side of the argument. That is not replacing testimony with comebacks. Done right, it clears rubble so testimony can breathe. Also, Saints in the 70s, 80s, and 90s absolutely had apologetics. Talmage, B. H. Roberts, Hugh Nibley, FARMS, Maxwell, and others were all engaged in defending and clarifying the faith. The internet changed the speed, audience, and tone, not the need. I agree that no one is argued into covenant life by cleverness alone. Testimony, sacrament, repentance, ordinances, and encounter with the living God are the center. But it is a false choice to say we must either bear witness or answer criticism. Alma reasoned. Paul disputed. Peter said to be ready to give an answer. Moroni wrote for future unbelievers. Joseph taught, corrected, and defended. The question is not whether we defend the faith. The question is whether we do it with light or with contempt. I think if you have enough humility and love, and you genuinely try to seek understanding from the other perspective, you can communicate in a way that edifies both sides. I think what you’re noticing is that Jacob is not trying to put himself in the shoes of the other side and really understand their perspective.

All of my children require vastly different parenting strategies. Nothing - seriously, nothing - has worked for all three of them so far except a strict bedtime routine.

@plasmarob I'm not as incensed over it as some are since I never subscribed to the DW. But my question is genuinely Why? Why are you using a political platform to attack allied religious groups? I can't get in the headspace.

from group DMs: "I’m mildly uncomfortable watching other members call for the Daily Wire to fire or censor a guy for saying what he thinks." "Yeah, it’s anti-Mormon, and that sucks. It goes to show that someone will always insist on being your enemy no matter how pointless it is." "That said, censorship from the higher ups in a media organization is bad in pretty much every situation. Everyone wants to be an exception to criticism. Nobody should be." "The issue is the obvious lies, I think. If he was saying we were heretics for rejecting Greek Philosophy, [few] would be complaining" "our hearts are being hardened"